Archive for December, 2009
The City Stirs
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
In its sleep, the city stirred. Beneath its streets, muscles rippled. Flagstones were cracked. Buildings trembled. Lives were endangered. “These are events outside the record of history,” the citizens told their crown-prince. “Something must be done.”
The prince’s advisors, the chymick Airtran, and the physick Elben, consulted. Never had the two seen eye to eye, but it was Elben that answered first.
“Our city wants,” he said. “It yearns. It struggles to approach its desires.”
“What does it desire?” the prince asked.
“That we must ascertain,” he replied.
Children were brought up to the city’s great ear. They stood upon the plateau of its pinna and sang into the pit there—sweet nothings to lull the city back to slumber.
The city stirred and a dozen lives were lost—spilled into the abyss.
Adventurous souls with little to lose clambered down the great crags of the city’s face. Barrels of liquor were roped down. The whole city seemed to sweat and groan at the heave of their descent. Finally the liquid was introduced to the lips of the city, and was heard to gurgle deep in the city’s bowels.
The city stirred and the citizens found they had no way to drown their sorrows.
A madwoman went south, to the city’s nethers, with lecherous claims for a solution. She never returned. Still the city stirred.
Then Airtran loosed his tongue, saying, “Too much time and too many lives have been lost. There is a simpler solution. If the city desires, then we simply remove the organ of desire.”
Elben spoke against such words, but the weight of the people was with Airtran. And so men dug. With picks, and spades, and blades they dug. Blood filled the hole but they pumped it away and dug on. The city twitched. Lives were crushed. They dug on. A thunder came from the pit. A crashing sound that deafened those who worked in the meaty depths of the hole. Still they dug,
Then at last they came to it. The great crashing, pulsating organ: the city’s heart. And Airtran, the chymick, descended and plied his trade, even against the horror of it all. And the heart blackened, and the heart slackened, and the heart died.
The city lay still.
The people cheered. Weeks passed. And slowly the scent of rot filled the air.
“Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily…”
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
Consensus molds reality. Why isn’t there a manifest God? No consensus! For every Baptist sure of Christ’s divinity, someone else fervently believes the opposite. Even two people who sit together in church don’t worship the same God. They may suppose they do, but ha! Six billion unique concepts cancel each other out. But you can game the system.
I decided to create the perfect partner for myself. I didn’t worry about official records. No one really cares about those. I made a Facebook page, Twitter account, LiveJournal, personal website, even a couple of T-shirt designs at Café Press. I invented a small business complete with everything except a product. (She’s a consultant; I left it vague.) Building a girlfriend from the bottom up, so to speak, kept me occupied. I posted elaborate descriptions of our dates. Natalie was so busy, I told my friends, that she didn’t have time to meet them in the flesh. She confirmed this in stressed-out posts on her blog.
Soon I was the biggest problem, because only I knew she wasn’t real! As time went by, more and more people added their increments of belief. Then my sister emailed.
“Invited Natalie for lunch,” Charlotte said, “it was so nice to finally meet her.” Um…what? I hadn’t even answered Charlotte’s invitation. That night my mother texted that she and Natalie were planning a joint shopping expedition. I stopped writing messages “from Natalie.” Didn’t matter. Everyone kept getting them, except me. I suspected a joke, even thought about ways to catch the perpetrators.
Then I realized I’d fallen into a trap. I couldn’t believe in a conspiracy. I had to believe all these messages were from the real Natalie. Only then could that become true. I took a few days off. I didn’t eat or sleep. I posted reminder notes from Natalie all over the apartment. I dug out unused Christmas cards, addressed them to Natalie and myself, and put them all over. I constantly repeated things like “don’t forget Natalie wants low-fat milk.” Pretty soon I was so hungry and so short on sleep that the distinction between reality and myth almost completely disappeared.
—
I woke up on the living room floor, dizzy with hunger. The TV mumbled. I smelled pizza.
“Dinner’s here,” Natalie called. “Hurry up, I have to be at the airport in an hour.”
“Coming!” I struggled to my feet. Better wash my face for our first date.